Tuesday, October 20, 2015

It’s a new ERA!

Open Access week is a great reason to celebrate ERA, the University of Alberta’s well-established open access digital repository. We’ve just launched ERA’s fresh new design and improved infrastructure, and invite you to explore the over 36,000 items in ERA’s collection at http://era.library.ualberta.ca.

ERA supports open access by providing a place for faculty to deposit their research and make it available to the rest of the world. Archiving in ERA is one easy way for researchers to meet new Tri-Agency requirements for open access as many publishers allow post-review articles to be shared through digital repositories. Sharing research broadly through a repository can increase its impact and reach, while also showcasing the work of research groups, departments, and teams, as well as students.

The new framework for ERA is built on Hydra, an open source software developed through the collaborative efforts of a number of institutions, including the University of Alberta. Together with our partners we are contributing to the development of better institutional repository solutions for organizations across North America and internationally. Moving ERA to the Hydra framework is an important step towards providing a more sustainable and stable approach to managing the Libraries’ diverse digitized collections. We expect ERA to grow dramatically in the future as we begin incorporating collections like Peel’s Prairie Provinces and The Sir Samuel Steele Collection into the same framework. We are also very excited to begin work to support different kinds of digital content in ERA, such as audio and video files.

Take a few minutes to explore the new ERA at https://era.library.ualberta.ca. Contact us with any questions at erahelp@ualberta.ca. We also invite you to help us continue to improve the usability of ERA by suggesting improvements, or by volunteering to participate in our frequent user testing.